The special effects for this re-released 1954 film by Ishiro Honda may now look a bit creaky, but the storytelling is muscular and the post-nuclear parable it offers is passionate and fascinatingly ambiguous. A fishing vessel disappears in calm waters; an undersea volcano? No, this is the ancient sea monster Gojira, or Godzilla, reawakened from the sleep of millennia by radioactivity from the nuclear blast. Its mighty feet pound on the land like a slow drumbeat of death.

Godzilla wreaks devastation on Japanese cities - portrayed in such a way as explicitly to recall Hiroshima and the Allies' bombing of Tokyo. Could it be that Godzilla gave Japan a way of confronting the carnage imaginatively, without the chagrin of military defeat? Or that Godzilla symbolises Japan's defiant survival, and even indeed its righteous anger and its own undiminished potential for retaliatory destruction? A scientist argues that the Japanese should keep Godzilla alive: "Learn amazing secrets of life from it ... it survived the nuclear blast; we must learn how ..." Either way, Godzilla's killing looks movingly sacrificial, a renunciation of violence. The sheer fervency of this film takes it beyond the crash-bang entertainment of most blockbusters, ancient and modern.